Tyrone Reid, Staff Reporter
SENIOR SUPERINTENDENT Reneto Adams says he is heading for the American consulate in Kingston today to verify that his visa to travel to the United States, like those of the other five cops acquitted of the Kraal killings, has been revoked by the U.S. authorities.
"I will be going to the Embassy to verify if my visa has been cancelled like the other policemen who were involved in the Kraal matter," SSP Adams told The Gleaner yesterday.
Adams said he has had a U.S.-entry visa for two decades, but confirmed that a "close family member", which other sources say is his wife, Mildred, has had her visa revoked by the Canadians.
Among the reasons the Canadians reportedly gave for revoking Mildred Adams' visa was the involvement of her husband in the Kraal killings.
Canadian officials could not be contacted for comment yesterday, and U.S. Embassy spokesman, Glen Guimond, said his country's policy prohibits the divulging of information on individual visa issues.
It was not clear whether Britain would place travel restrictions on Adams or any of the other policemen involved in the Kraal incident, given that officials at the High Commission in Kingston were unavailable for comment.
The likelihood of Adams having been banned from the United States arose yesterday when it emerged that the other policemen with whom he was charged for murder at Kraal, corporals Patrick Coke and Shane Lyons, and constables Roger Collier, Devon Bernard and Leeford Gordon, could no longer travel to the U.S. legally.
EMBARRASSING
Bernard said his and his colleagues' visas had been annulled, a fact discovered under embarrassing circumstances for two of them.
Bernard, who has emerged as spokesman for the group, told The Gleaner yesterday that Gordon spent six hours at the John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York last week being questioned by U.S. Immigration officials before being refused entry and sent back home. At the time Bernard was carrying documents showing he had been freed in the Jamaican courts for the killing of four people in Kraal, Clarendon, in March, 2003.
SIMILAR SITUATION
Collier had found himself in a similar situation in February at an airport in Miami. He, too, was told that the stop order was still in effect. This, two months after the police officers were freed.
Adams was head of the controversial Crime Management Unit (CMU), which was accused by human rights groups of extra-judicial killings. In the Kraal incident, police said the CMU went to the south central Jamaican town in search of a criminal when they were fired on. In what the cops claimed was an ensuing gunfight, four people, including two women, were shot dead.
The incident led to the dismantling of the CMU and the charging of the six policemen, including Adams. The group was acquitted last December.
The possibility of Adams not being able to travel to the U.S. or other major countries with which Jamaica has close law enforcement relationships will be embarrassing to the administration and the constabulary.
The fact became public only two days after Adams, who
was on suspension since his being charged in 2004, was reinstated in the constabulary and named to a job as an intelligence analysts, reporting directly to Police Commissioner Lucius Thomas.
Bernard insisted yesterday that he and his colleagues would fight the visa revocation, which they felt was unfair.
"We intend to pursue every means to get to the bottom of this. We don't intend to sit down and be treated like this," he told The Gleaner. "In essence we are not free. We are still being punished for what we have been acquitted of in the courts."
Bernard said the group would be seeking the intervention of the Police Commissioner.
However Carolyn Gomes, executive director of Jamaicans for Justice (JFJ), said that the American government reserves the right to grant or deny visas that facilitate entry into its country. "They turn down decent human beings all the time ... it is not a (human) rights issue," she said.
